1 Rainbow Flags Flutter in Gay Neighborhoods
Brett is a “New York City boy.” Gay, New Yorker, sexy, funky, wacky: he looks as if he stepped out of a song by the Pet Shop Boys. When I first met him, Brett was a barista at Big Cup. Mornings he took music classes at the New School. In the afternoon, he made his living as a personal trainer at a fitness center. At night, he worked at this gay café in Chelsea, one of New York’s main gayborhoods, as gay neighborhoods are sometimes referred to.
With his washed-out Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt, Converse All Stars, torn jeans, shoulder-length mussed hair, and overly blue eyes, Brett was gay twenty-four hours a day. He went out “every night.” His rule of life: “No straight people after 8:00 p.m.” As I watch him now in his first video on Logo, MTV’s LGBT channel, with his longer hair, he seems more self-confident, but he has kept this very American “indie” attitude, an indie performer who wants to become famous. “Today I am a musician and gay. I chose to come out on Logo. And I’m ‘cleanin’ out my closet,’ as Eminem sings it.”
Brett lives the “American gay way of life.” He is evolving at the heart of New York City’s gay subculture: somewhat shady, small, hybrid rock music clubs, off-off-Broadway theater, experimental showcases advertised on alternative sites, art galleries scattered across campuses, urban night trash, and everything he calls the “queer” scene. He constantly moves from one party to another, from one neighborhood to another. One day he is in a transvestite bar in the Bowery or the East Village, both so well photographed by Nan Goldin; on another night it’s an arty club in Hell’s Kitchen, where they’re screening Tarnation, an underground gay movie; sometimes he ends his evening in a vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown that has an open-mike session in the basement, where alternative artists freely take turns at the microphone. Nonstop roundtrips on the subway: Brett spends his time on the A line, traveling uptown and downtown, between Chelsea, the East Village, Greenwich Village, and Hell’s Kitchen—the four main gay neighborhoods of New York City.
In the 2000s, Big Cup is a quiet window into Chelsea’s gay community. It is a small daytime café on Eighth Avenue, with purple walls and large, colorful flowers, overly kitschy art deco. It doesn’t serve alcohol. A whole microsociety meets up there, sometimes under age, young people between eighteen and twenty-one years old, when alcohol consumption is not yet permitted and bars are yet to be accessible. Students pore over their work, slumped in large leather armchairs. The Bio Queens buy their fresh fruit juices there or vitamin drinks such as Odwalla, Naked, and VitaminWater. A twiggy young Puerto Rican wigs out with a bearded Mexican illegal immigrant, who doesn’t seem very worried about not having papers (there are some 15 million undocumented Latinos like him in the United States). A young graduate from South Dakota is still amazed he was able to leave his family to move to New York City. This is America in miniature, a sampling of America, an America made up of minorities and diversity ever since 1978, when the Supreme Court of the United States, in its famous Bakke decision, raised cultural diversity to the level of a new matrix for society. On a more global scale, this “cultural diversity” was little by little to become the ideology of globalization.
At Big Cup, the music is low key and more intimate and discreet than in bars. You can browse alternative newspapers such as the Village Voice, the Onion, Vice, Time Out New York with its Gay & Lesbian section, and dozens of free gay papers in which numerous parties are listed. Unlike chains such as Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Big Cup is a family and local establishment that tries to maintain community and the tradition of mom-and-pop shops (even though, here, the owners are a gay couple, so this café is of the pop-and-pop shop variety). From the counter, Brett serves smoothies, green tea, refills of Americanos (you can refill at will), bagels with Philadelphia cream cheese, and, of course, typical American pastries such as carrot cake and cheesecake. Salary: $4 per hour, not including tips—the tips make up the rest. It says “people who tip are cool” on a small iron box on the counter. At Big Cup, as elsewhere in New York’s cafés, bars, and restaurants, there’s been no smoking since 2003. When you leave, you’re on the Eighth Avenue sidewalk, and that’s quite a show.
Big Cup is in Chelsea, a neighborhood of no more than ten blocks between Fourteenth and Twenty-Third Street and bordered on the east and west by Sixth Avenue and Tenth. It is a modern, gentrified gay area. Not so much a village, closed in on itself and its small streets, but what I call a “cluster,” crisscrossed by wide avenues and more open. In Chelsea’s restaurants, such as the Viceroy, the Pastis, and the Empire Diner, you see splendid gay couples in their forties, with George Clooney–like salt-and-pepper beards, wearing ties or on casual Friday unbuttoned collars, already proud of their success as bankers, financiers, and affinity real estate brokers. In the Greenwich Village of the 1970s, the gay movement saw itself as radical and anticapitalist. It provoked. Guerrilla-style actions took place. In Chelsea today, nobody challenges authority: it’s about consuming, being gay in the military, getting married, and even being elected to Congress. It’s about power.
In Chelsea, the gay community is no longer confined to bars and restaurants: it includes dozens of specialized travel agencies, communications businesses, and law firms. Insurance agents and real estate brokers, traders and lobbyists, veterinarians, and even the pastors of gay parishes—all are well established. A peddler of underwear—white briefs, trunks, boxers, and other Calvin Klein tighty-whiteys—has made a fortune on Seventh Avenue. Store name: Oh My God! He understood early on that attitude counts more now than fashion. Even the liquor store in the area promotes the rainbow-colored special edition of Absolut Vodka, whose gay-marriage-supporting ads explicitly target the gay community: “Mark, will you marry me?—Steve.”
At every street corner: a rainbow flag. Ever since San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker imagined it in 1978, the rainbow flag, consisting of six horizontal stripes (usually red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple in the sequence), has become the worldwide symbol of the LGBT cause. In Chelsea, it adorns the windows of coffee shops, bookstores, delis, and gay-friendly hotels. At the Chelsea Pines Inn, which consciously belongs to the gay community, each room bears the image of a film star. Elsewhere, even straight boutique hotels display the rainbow flag to appear friendlier. The gay flag is frequently flown from the windows of private homes.
And then, of course, there are the nights, which remain Chelsea’s claim to fame: its clubs are concentrated a little farther off, west of Tenth Avenue near the Hudson River, in a warehouse district of former slaughterhouses and wholesalers where residences are rare—which conveniently minimizes the risk of nighttime noise and disturbances. This neighborhood—the Meatpacking District—has, however, grown more gentrified, thanks in particular to (or because of) the transformation of an old railway line into a suspended urban park: the High Line. A resident gay couple, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, worried about the possibility that the line would get demolished, and so they mobilized to protect it. The High Line has become a successful ecological symbol, although some people, nostalgic for the 1980s, are unhappy about the fact that the neighborhood has been gentrified. Be that as it may, Chelsea remains the New York City hangout for boys, junkies, hipster-artists, and flirty party animals. All night long, there’s a drugstore on Eighth Avenue that offers the usual products, from food to drugs, alongside condoms and lubricants on its promotional racks. In fact, everything announces itself as being 24/7.
Chelsea’s fitness clubs don’t open until 5:00 a.m. Fitness rooms are the other great local passion: gays, who were not very excited about sports until the mid-1970s, began taking care of their bodies in the 1980s. A workout is a real addiction: after thirty-five, gays go at it as diligently as they went to gay bars ten years earlier. In Chelsea, a gym is a matter of community, and there’s a plethora of offers. Be it at the Dolphin Fitness Club, the Chelsea Gym, or the New York Health Club, memberships, which are often expensive, offer unlimited classes in stretching, Hi Low, Body Attack, Body Pump, and Ultimate Burn Off sessions. At the Sports Club/LA, a high-end California fitness center that opened several satellite gyms in New York City, the offer also includes Splash Cardio Fusion, Steamline Sculpt, and MAXimum Burn classes. You can care for your abs and glutes (Bottom Special) under the supervision of a personal trainer with the physique of a Marlboro Man—albeit one who no longer smokes. For a long time, gays saw themselves as unique and singular, but in Chelsea’s gyms they discover they are rather ordinary and unremarkable. Almost clones.
Today, Chelsea’s image comes down to these overly body-built gay men who are frequently veggie, who buy their organic bananas and their tofu at the Trader Joe’s on Sixth Avenue or at the Whole Foods on Seventh. They wake up early, live in similar apartments, wear the same Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, and share a passion for the same luxury dogs. People sometimes make fun of the gay liberation that has taken on muscle, trading in effeminate bodies for pumping iron and caricature. But the neighborhood deserves better than such prejudices. Today Chelsea is certainly a chastened gay community, but it still knows how to party. It is in Chelsea and other gay American “clusters” that topless servers display their Calvin Klein briefs and go-go boys adorn happy hours. This is where flyers began to be handed out with phrases destined to have a global future: “no cover,” “hottest boys,” “save the date,” as well as the New York phenomenon “‘I’m a local’ night,” an evening privileging local customers over gays who come in from the suburbs. These coded references go hand in hand with a certain compartmentalization of gay life in Chelsea. The “bears” go to bear bars, Latinos hang out with Hispanics, the Chinese frequent their own bars—and there is even the Habibi Dance Party, a Muslim gay party where gays from all over the Middle East meet and watch a performance and striptease show of burqa-clad transvestites and for whom New York is, if not a freedom oasis, then at least a refuge.
In Chelsea, gays are increasingly living as couples, and even before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in June 2015 in the United States, they were able to marry legally. In addition, they are raising funds for electoral campaigns. American gays have understood that they must flex their political muscles if they are to advance their cause and their rights.
Today Chelsea is still an iconic gay Manhattan neighborhood, but it is only one among many steps toward the postgay city that New York has become. Before Chelsea, there was Greenwich Village around Christopher Street, and more recently, to the east of Broadway, there was the East Village.
Around the world, in Shanghai and Johannesburg, in Havana and even in Tehran, gays would tell me about the Stonewall Inn. Even if they had never come to the United States and couldn’t place Greenwich Village on the map of New York City, they knew the myth and the place. It is a small but long, seedy bar located at 53 Christopher Street, just at Sheridan Square. There, on the night of June 28, 1969, several hundred gay men clashed with police in what would become the most famous riot in LGBT history—commemorated for the first time a year later in 1970 and since then across the world every year in June under the name “Gay Pride.”
I’m re-reading the three short discrete articles from the New York Times of the time, June 29 and 30 and July 3, 1969, which make up the origin narrative of this homosexual Bastille uprising (the use of the word gay was forbidden in that newspaper until 1987). Forty years later the facts remain mysterious, much less what set them all in motion. The New York Police Department (NYPD) entered the bar at 2:15 a.m. to stop the illegal sale of alcohol and to check servers’ IDs. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was a private club, patronized by members, and the innkeeper took it upon himself to allow men to dance together. And this is the crux of the matter: homosexuals came there only to dance. One person, not yet called a DJ, played Motown soul and funk. Gays were already forecasting the disco wave that would sweep across New York and the world in the early 1970s. However, in 1969, surprising as it may seem today, men were prohibited from dancing together in many US clubs. The NYPD often arrested men they caught in the act of dancing together for “nonnormative behavior in public spaces.” To break the ban against men dancing together was to move gay liberation forward. As happened at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969.
The bar was, moreover, an improbable location for an uprising. It was part of an old homophilic world, from before gay liberation. By 1969, it had already acquired a slightly shady reputation because of its alleged ties to the Mafia and because of its clientele of alcoholics and prostitutes. Many homosexuals found it a bit shabby. The Martin Luther King Jr. of the gay liberation movement wasn’t going to emerge from this café. And yet …
So on June 28, 1969, thirteen people were arrested, among them transvestites, transsexuals, and hippies, and a huge number of homosexuals were kicked out of the bar in the middle of the night. Around 3:00 a.m., their exasperation having peaked at these illegitimate police raids and the frequent harassment, these homosexuals broke into revolt, apparently spontaneously, first by throwing loose change and then bricks, burning garbage cans, and even an out-of-service parking meter at the forces of order. This rebel gesture has become legendary: fighting with glass bottles while wearing stiletto heels. “It’s a revolution!” exclaimed Sylvia Rivera, a flamboyant transsexual born Ray Rivera who—historians generally take this for granted—is supposed to have been the first to throw a bottle at an officer, shouting about “coming out of the closet.” Was this when the expression was coined? Was Sylvia the first to utter it? (She died recently, leaving behind several versions of the story.) Nevertheless, NYPD riot police were dispatched as backup. Nearly 400 people were involved in the uprising that took place on and off over three nights. Several homosexuals were wounded, and some police, too, were shaken or concussed—some of them claiming to have been bitten! On the windows of the café that the police had severely vandalized, the rioters simply wrote: “Legalize gay bars.” That was the bottom line: the local demand for what was to become the largest gay revolution in history.
Before Stonewall, the word gay itself was rarely used, and there was no talking about coming out or being out. Homosexuality was illegal in the United States in every state except Illinois. For the first time, with Stonewall, homosexuals—like blacks with Rosa Parks, the mother of the African American civil rights who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in Alabama in 1955—began standing proudly and saying, “No.” And once this foundational act took place, the entire antigay system of oppression—which in the interim developed into homophobia—collapsed like a house of cards. “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” would become one of the queer movement’s slogans a few decades later.
Yet the event was not much discussed at the time. The press, even the Left press, pretty much ignored it; TV and radio barely mentioned it. The few commentaries were condescending. A journalist from the Village Voice wrote ironically about the fact that homosexuals mobilized just hours after attending the funeral of their idol, actress and singer Judy Garland, who died of a drug overdose on June 22 at age forty-seven and was buried in New York on June 27, hours before the uprising started.
Today, the Stonewall Inn is once again a quiet bar. Dozens of books tell its story. They don’t play Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” there anymore, but rainbow flags flutter out front. The Stonewall Veterans’ Association commemorates militancy. President Barack Obama paid tribute to this café on the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in a speech at the White House in the presence of leaders of the American gay community. He recalled how the long road to gay liberation began there, in that bar, at a time when homosexuality was still an offense. That a revolution such as this one should have started in such an unlikely small bar before spreading around the world remains a mystery that historians have not fully explained. The Stonewall Inn itself has remained frozen in a story that extends beyond it. With its quaint atmosphere and no-longer-young customers, it good-naturedly continues to commemorate its revolutionary days and now can charge more for beers. It’s pitiful! Tourists go there in great numbers, take pictures, but don’t stay for the evening; New Yorkers avoid it—too “faggy” for them; gays in the neighborhood recognize only its acquired reputation, but gay life has moved on.
Greenwich Village remains, in the image of its standard-bearing bar, one of New York’s gay neighborhoods, but it is now a slightly frozen gayborhood, as if already a museum. On Christopher Street, souvenir shops predominate, peddling miniature dildos, penis-shaped penne, and T-shirts that say “heterofriendly” or “I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is.” Yet the atmosphere has changed. An eloquent symbol: the famous Oscar Wilde bookstore, located at the corner Christopher Street and Gay Street (you can’t make up this stuff!), which branded the area’s gay culture, closed its doors for good in 2009. Founded in 1967, it was the oldest gay bookstore in the world. Its disappearance? Blame the excessively high rents of the neighborhood, the specialized gay sections of large, chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders and of online sellers such as Amazon.com, which dried up the economic model of small, niche, gay booksellers. Another sign of a deeper phenomenon: not only has the Village lost its leadership over gay life in New York City, but it has also abandoned its bohemian spirit. Greenwich Village used to be Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beat movement’s birthplace on the East Coast. Nowadays, this window onto global gay life presents unaffordable rents and off-off-Broadway theaters turned into luxury stores. The neighborhood no longer has a single ounce of atmosphere. It is a historic district that some associations are trying to preserve—a historic neighborhood that is no longer vibrant. Greenwich Village has lost its gay population and its artists, too, and a whole underground subculture has moved on.
* * *
“The Village has never been my neighborhood,” Brett explains at the BBar. “I have great respect for Stonewall and for what gays did in 1969. Their punch in the gut of the police gave us freedom. And it made men of them! But I prefer living in the East Village.”
So Brett moved there or, more precisely, to St. Marks Place, a mythic address. After Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the East Village is the third gay district of New York. Less bourgeois than the first and less tidy than the second, it was an unsafe neighborhood for a long time—dangerous even when going eastward toward what is still called Alphabet City, where avenues are lettered instead of numbered (Avenues A, B, C, and D). But here, too, poverty and violence ceded their place to “cool.” Today the East Village is a neighborhood of upscale boutiques, trendy restaurants, and chic galleries. Between First and Fourteenth Streets, it’s party time every night. “Give me a break!” Brett blurts out, overwhelmed by such an abundance of “partiiiiiies” (“enough with all these parties”). Besides, as so many victories of gay liberation march on, the partying that was initially confined to Avenues A and B has moved to Avenues C and D. To help create both a friendly and “arty” identity, artists unable to live in an offbeat atmosphere exhibit at every street corner. The mix of gays and artists: that is a postgay alternative neighborhood par excellence.
In the East Village, all the bars are gay-friendly, and labels matter less than in other gay neighborhoods of New York. Being gay is not necessarily an identity here, but a lifestyle, an attitude. The gravity of gay life has vanished, even though niche spots also exist: the Phoenix Bar for cruising and the Eagle for “mature men,” Lucky Cheng’s for drag queens, the Cock Bar for informed audiences, the Pick Me Up Café for students, the Eastern Bloc for “Communist” gays (by which “alternative” is meant), the Pyramid for clubbers, the Alt Café for lesbians, and Nowhere for everyone else. Nevertheless, the East Village is not Chelsea. Most bars mix fluidly, and ethnic diversities mingle, at the risk of a watered-down “gayness.” In postgay neighborhoods, does anyone still speak of homosexuality?
This is the question that comes up at the BBar. Located at 358 the Bowery, in the heart of the East Village, it is a huge place where bars are lined up, with different atmospheres, extending into a large garden with great garlands of palm trees—even at the height of summer. The BBar is hip every night, a strange mixture attracting worldly socialites, professional night owls, and passé stars of the 1980s (I saw Boy George and his peroxided assemblage there several times). Only once a week, on Tuesdays, is the bar openly gay, for the Beige-themed evening. That’s the night gayness meets up with cool.
The opposition between “cool” and “square” is closely tied to the history of the East Village. It was in the columns of the Village Voice, the alternative, countercultural and free weekly headquartered next to the BBar, that writer Norman Mailer inaugurated his column “The Hip and the Square” in 1950. Later, in the famous article “The White Negro” he would expand on the concept of “hip” and its racial and gender implications. Mailer described the “white Negro,” that white young man who dreamed of being black in order to be in fashion: he dressed in the same clothes as blacks, used ghetto slang, and valued black jazz at a premium because it was hipper than white music.
This is exactly what is happening now with gays. The BBar is one of those places where you can distinguish between hip and square, where the boundary is drawn between what is cool and what is not. Young gay men such as Brett, an MTV subscriber, a city columnist for the Village Voice, and a gay critic for Time Out New York, do nothing else. They are tastemakers and trendsetters who foreshadow fashions and parties. They used to be called “hipsters” or “glamour stars”; today, they “create buzz.” How did gays become trendsetters and influencers? How might one explain that straight youth from Kansas or Ohio belonging to the lower or middle classes are able to recognize themselves in gay culture? Why does American popular culture often find its source in black ghettos or gay neighborhoods at the margins of society?
All you needed to do was live for a bit of time in the East Village to have been struck by how dynamic this underground culture was before it became mainstream—or not. Like at CBGB, the legendary club on the Bowery, where American punk was born. Lou Reed’s shadow also hung over the East Village. Blondie got her start there. Madonna lived there. This was where Lady Gaga developed her character, between the Lower East Side and the Bowery. This was where artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat lived. It’s where Nan Goldin lived and took the well-known photographs for her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And in her memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith tells of her nights in the East Village with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who was her lover before he tipped into homosexuality. The East Village was both elitist and popular; a mix of artsy culture and entertainment. On one hand, the Broadway rock musical Rent takes place there; on the other, the Public Theater on Lafayette Street was where gay playwright Tony Kushner, famous for Angels in America, produced his sophisticated play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism. The video game Guitar Hero was also modeled on the East Village. The move from punk to mass entertainment, from drag queens to Broadway, from the counterculture to Hollywood, and from the margins to the heart of American culture often remains a mystery, and the East Village holds its secret.
Today the district has lost its radicalness. Heterosexual brokers invested in it, and it was in turn gentrified. La Mama and Performance Space 122 remained avant-garde locales, just like the Public Theater, but CBGB closed its doors for good in late 2006. Now commercial and “fake,” St. Marks Place no longer draws in anyone but tourists and young people from the suburbs, who in Manhattan are ironically called “bridge-and-tunnel people” (because they use bridges and tunnels to come from the suburbs on weekends). Brett no longer recognizes his neighborhood: “As a gay person, I belong to a minority, and I’ve never been able to be part of the majority. Something is missing, and it’s an opportunity. I can anticipate what the majority wants, but once I realize what the masses expect, I revert to my community. The East Village disappoints me. I am always between the underground and the mainstream. For example, I wore Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts before everyone else, but I don’t anymore today. And I’m going to leave the East Village for Brooklyn.”
At Big Cup in Chelsea, as in in the East Village, all the cool New York gays in early 2000 seemed to be wearing Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. Well after the outdated, very 1980s Calvin Klein underpants and just before men indulged in hand kissing in Dolce & Gabbana ads (in the mid-2000s), this New York brand would fascinate American gay men—and soon gay men worldwide. Using its long ago (1892) founders’ names, A&F was revived in the early 1990s as a brand of casual wear, including its famous hoodies, its Athletics T-shirts, its Fitch sweatshirts, and its polo shirts branded with an elk—A&F’s animal logo. From the outset, A&F targeted gay men using explicitly homoerotic images. Everything contributed to the marketing plan: sexy ads assigned to photographer Bruce Weber, beardless and muscular model-salesmen recruited through casting agencies, and fashion catalogs (including the famous A&F Quarterly, which would become the object of several lawsuits owing to its pictures of naked boys). Showing nudity to sell clothes—Who came up with that?! Better yet, using gay phantasmagoria to sell the brand to straight youth all over the world? That was daring! In the 2000s, the Abercrombie & Fitch brand became the ubiquitous brand in the East Village’s gay bars and Chelsea’s gyms, unlike its sister brand, American Apparel, whose marketing was also sexually inflected but which was nurturing social awareness, a national fiber, and a straighter image. A&F soon grew on American campuses, where the gay imaginary was a loss leader for young women before the appearance of explicitly college-age collections the company called the Ivy League Style. Abercrombie’s management bet that straight students would buy its products if gay men wore them first. And that is what happened: with the “cool” label conferred on it by gay men, A&F was now all the rage among “young metropolitan adults” of both sexes—its true core target. In 2005, the brand dropped its gay and student niche to become more mainstream and opened a giant store on Fifth Avenue in New York before beginning to grow massively abroad. Gays have since launched other fashions and adopted other outfits because everyone began to dress like them. Far from the East Village.
In New York, there are other gay districts besides Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and the East Village. In this typically postgay city, the confined space of “villages” no longer applies. Gays are at home everywhere. Manhattan is entirely gay-friendly, which explains the irresistible magnetism of metropolitan New York City on gay culture worldwide. According to a (not necessarily scientific) study by the gay center of New York, 7 million gay tourists visit New York every year.
For some years now, a new gay district has been emerging west of Times Square in an area called Hell’s Kitchen (from Forty-Fifth to Fifty-Fifth Street, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues). Gay venues here alternate with straight places, and you can no longer really speak of a “gayborhood” like Chelsea because gay people are fully involved and integrated with other New Yorkers. They no longer seem to live in an ethnocentric world apart. “It happens that Hell’s Kitchen is a neighborhood where there are many gay people, but it’s absolutely not a gay ghetto,” says Matt, a waiter at Posh, Hell’s Kitchen’s first gay bar. Restaurants such as the VYNL and cafés such as the Coffee Pot are openly hetero-friendly. And even gay bars such as Barrage and Vlada and a clubbing space such as Therapy attest to the diversity of people in the neighborhood. There are many gay hotels (Out NYC) and gay residences (505), but that doesn’t alter the postgay nature of Hell’s Kitchen.
There are many other gay areas in New York, and gay locales are increasingly scattered, here on the Lower East Side, there on the Upper East Side or toward Soho—solitude no longer seems to frighten patrons of gay bars, who not too long ago were reluctant to leave their ghetto. In Queens, the Latino neighborhood of Jackson Heights in particular, I found several Mexican, Guatemalan, and Puerto Rican gay places. (On Roosevelt Avenue, Gay Pride takes place yearly with floats where each Latino community flies its country’s flag and a rainbow flag.) In Brooklyn, especially in the hip neighborhood of Dumbo (Down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and in the Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg but also in Park Slope, gay places—friendly neighborhood bars, restaurants, and coffee shops—are cropping up everywhere. Such is the case of the Metropolitan, for example, the busiest gay bar in Brooklyn, on Lorimer Street, where a beer costs $2 and the veggie burger is a must. Queer counterculture is everywhere—for example, in the experimental corners of the aptly named Under the Radar festival. Brooklyn also has one of the most vibrant lesbian communities in the world—and serves as a backdrop for a reality-TV version of the TV series The L Word.
After living in Harlem and the East Village, after working in Chelsea, Brett had just moved near Brooklyn Heights. Big Cup has closed after eleven years of good and loyal service. Blame high rents, gentrification, and Starbucks, which has invaded Manhattan. For that matter, if one were to look for a thread connecting gay neighborhoods in New York, Starbucks would be one of the common threads.
On Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, there are five Starbucks. In the East Village, you can find four of them, and in Greenwich Village and Hell’s Kitchen another dozen yet. “Initially, around 2001 or 2002,” Brett says, “I didn’t much like going to Starbucks in Chelsea. Like all gays, I was afraid community spots and independents would disappear. And it’s true that Starbucks killed Big Cup. But gradually gays have adopted them to the point where today all of Chelsea’s Starbucks are gay.”
There has been such an increase in the number of Starbucks in gay neighborhoods that one may well wonder whether management made it a priority of their business plan to target gay neighborhoods to locate new shops. Of the 11,000 Starbucks in the United States today (out of about 23,000 worldwide), most are located in “bouzhee” city outskirts, rich suburbs, airports, and shopping malls—the perfect antithesis to McDonald’s, which is more likely to be located in a lower-class neighborhood. Whenever it can, Starbucks sticks to gay areas, in Chelsea as in Paris, Mexico City, Rio, and Tokyo. And even sometimes, as in Montreal on the rue Sainte-Catherine, it sports a huge rainbow flag. The coffee is more expensive there and not as good as elsewhere; the products it sells there are a far cry from healthy, and yet Starbucks has managed to create an ecological and cool image. Counter service and the freedom to sit where you want, Wi-Fi access, a strict smoking ban, some music—smooth jazz, middle-of-the-road rock ’n’ roll, retro soul music, as well as the unbearable, corny Christmas tunes—and smart product placement in the TV series NCIS and Sex & the City—all have contributed to the coolness. But the gay factor is engaged full throttle. Gay employee couples get the same benefits as married couples, and in 2012 Starbucks’ management officially declared its support for same-sex marriage in a press release and then in various high-profile media interviews: “This law matches practices that Starbucks stands for. We are committed to diversity and favor equal rights for all couples,” the vice president of the Seattle company said. After the “green washing” that gave its cafés a somewhat usurped fair-trade touch, Starbucks turned “pink washing” into a marketing model. (For a company or a government, pink washing amounts to using the gay cause to confer on itself a gay-friendly image, regardless of what it actually does for gay people.) Nevertheless, antigay organizations got the message: they immediately mobilized, called for a Starbucks boycott throughout the entire United States, though without much effect. Even in Texas, Starbucks remained popular—and gay-friendly.
Mapping American Gay Neighborhoods
Could the future of gay life be located in Texas? I surveyed a hundred cities in the United States, spread over thirty-five states, and it was in Texas that I discovered the most dynamic gayborhoods. Houston, Dallas, and Austin: each of these three cities has a developed gay neighborhood, in contrast to the Texas we typically imagine as a strictly homophobic state. Not long ago, being gay in San Antonio or Houston meant experiencing loneliness. Gay locales were rare, and organizations discreet. Now there are bars everywhere, Gay Pride parades, LGBT film festivals—and even churches that open their doors to gay parishioners. Even more surprising are the statistics from the US Census that show that same-sex couples more often have children in southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, for example) than in other regions of the United States. Latino and black gay couples are often twice as likely as whites to raise children. Contrary to what one might expect, homosexuality has grown increasingly easier in the South—as easy, in any case, as in the large white and democratic capitals of the East Coast.
If one tries to map out gay neighborhoods in the United States, one can propose a typology that complements that of New York’s gayborhoods. First of all, clusters like the one in Chelsea can be found in Texas. Gay bars are located within a specific area, near each other. You can see this in Houston on Montrose Boulevard, in Austin on Fourth Street near the Texas State Congress, in Dallas around Oak Lawn. Why are these bars grouped into clusters? Self-defense in the ultrarepublican state of Texas? Maybe, but although the state is one of the most homophobic in the United States, these three Texas cities are Democrat. And in reality major US cities everywhere are increasingly gay-friendly. Thirty years ago a gay man would leave his native Kentucky or Texas for Greenwich Village or San Francisco. Today he can live peacefully with his husband and have children who wear T-shirts that say “I love my daddies” in Louisville or San Antonio. One might also think, however, that the consolidation maintains commercial efficiencies. In Houston and Dallas in particular, these gay clusters are located in the midst of shopping malls and big-box stores (Walmart and Barnes & Noble, for example). In these impersonal city outskirts, community spirit exists through these clusters. It is also good marketing according to the rule that the best place to open a supermarket is near an existing supermarket. This yields a cluster.
Another widespread model is the village. Inside a metropolis, several gay venues gather in a small area, not at the periphery but at the center of the city. Greenwich Village in New York is typical of this model, as is Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood (between West Belmont and North Halsted Avenues, an area called Boystown). Nevertheless, the typical village example remains the Castro district of San Francisco. Around Market Street and the Castro Mini metro station, gay life laid roots back in the 1970s, with its shops, dozens of bars, and the right, granted by municipal statute, to walk naked in the streets. And there’s a whole mythology that is maintained by Armistead Maupin’s novel series Tales of the City (despite its taking place outside the Castro), Gus Van Sant’s movie Harvey Milk, and the LGBT History Museum in the Castro. You have to attend a special screening of a Wizard of Oz sing-a-long at the neighborhood’s iconic cinema located at 429 Castro Street to understand what “village” and “community” really mean: a thousand gay men dressing the parts, singing, and dancing to the adventures of Dorothy, her dog, Toto, and the Wicked Witch of the West. While Greenwich Village in New York tends to normalize, the Castro today remains incredibly dynamic, with its queer and trans activism and its Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The village model continues to have a strong urban and cultural identity that differentiates it from the cluster, which is a more disembodied and pragmatic enclave, often located far from the historic city centers, between avenues, highways, or shopping malls in a noncentral, modern part of town or a soulless exurb, beyond the suburbs.
The third model is the strip. A typical example is West Hollywood, Los Angeles. There, gay places are lined up on either side of a large avenue, Santa Monica Boulevard. Over approximately 500 meters, there are about thirty gay venues, cafés, bars, and bookstores—with a Starbucks at each end as if to define the strip. You can find this model in the gay Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC, where gay venues are located on either side of Connecticut Avenue and Seventeenth Street. This is also the case par excellence at Las Vegas, a city built along the famous “strip,” including gay bars.
The fourth model is the colony. Often old and historical, colonies are summer areas, coastal locations, or islands. The perfect examples are the capes and islands where gays have settled: Provincetown on Cape Cod, near Boston; Fire Island, Long Island, near New York City; Key West, the southernmost tip of Florida. One can add to them cities that became unexpected gay destinations, such as Fort Lauderdale (north of Miami) and Savannah (Georgia). Not to mention Palm Springs, whose population is supposedly one-third gay—and it is even more isolated, not on an island but in the heart of the California desert.
Another model, perhaps the most exciting, is less geographical than it is sociocultural and political. I call it alternative, although some would prefer to call it artsy or cutting edge, offbeat, or even bobo. This is the most successful model of gay gentrification and of gays becoming more bourgeois. At the outset, it is often located in a disused, shady neighborhood or a declining city center (as in downtown St. Louis, Kansas City, or Boston). For some reason, probably related to cheaper rents, gay men as well as artists and the whole creative class settle there. LGBT film festivals are launched, art galleries born, start-ups grown, and a Starbucks opened. The neighborhood is reborn and soon gets gentrified. The typical example is New York’s East Village, but also Hell’s Kitchen near Times Square or the Williamsburg and Dumbo neighborhoods of Brooklyn. This is also the case of Boston’s South End, which was abandoned and dangerous in the 1970s, revitalized when gay men arrived, and today has a more artistic appearance and is more expensive and more middle class. Gay neighborhoods in the downtowns of St. Louis, Kansas City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are also alternative gay neighborhoods: gay venues are now helping bring new life to these downtowns.
The city of Detroit provides both an example of an alternative district and several clusters—proof of a gay concern to be different and sometimes to distance themselves from the persistent segregation of blacks. On one hand, Detroit is a black city that remains extremely segregated, with gay bars for whites in the wealthy suburb of Ferndale north of 8 Mile Road. Here, the gilded youth of Michigan come out and enjoy themselves far from the black ghetto that Detroit has almost completely become. But I also find a few gay bars in the less-affluent and less-white suburb of Dearborn, an industrial area west of the city where the Ford plants are. And then, in recent years, the first gay shops started appearing in the city center, the heart of downtown Detroit, in a very depressed area near the Detroit River, which forms the border with Canada. In this extremely poor ghetto, gay bars could be the promising sign of the beginning of revitalization.
The last type of gay area is a countermodel, and it is gaining ground in the United States over other types of gayborhoods: instead of clustering, gay venues spread out and scatter about the city’s map. I call it sprawl. This is the case in Phoenix, Arizona, where gay bars are scattered throughout the city and in different suburbs (Glendale, Tempe, Scottsdale). There is no cluster, no village, not even a gayborhood: places are scattered throughout the urban area at a distance from each other. Such dispersion also exists in Atlanta, Denver, and Miami (not Miami Beach)—all fragmented and sprawling cities by definition.
In many American cities, lines are not so clearly drawn. And sometimes competition develops among districts, a phenomenon that seems to have been increasing since 2000. In Boston, for example, the gay community is divided between gay men remaining faithful to the historic South End, the alternative neighborhood that has been gentrified, and those who prefer to live elsewhere, without any neighborhood emerging as a true second choice: Cambridge’s student neighborhoods, where Harvard and MIT are located; Jamaica Plain, often chosen by gay couples with children and by lesbians; Dorchester, where rents are cheaper but the area less safe; or the upscale Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhoods at the center of Boston. “More and more gay couples are having children, and because of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts there is more and more integration. So distinct gay neighborhoods are less and less frequent,” said Ron Miller, an engineer who ran an MIT program and who lived in the South End for a long time and now chooses to live in Cambridge with his husband.
In Los Angeles, too, gay people hesitate between the West Hollywood ghetto and the chic alternative Silver Lake and Echo Park neighborhoods. Same thing in Chicago: on one hand, there are Lakeview and Boystown, a classic gayborhood; on the other, gays scatter farther north uptown, to the Loop in the center or even to Hyde Park to the south. As for San Francisco, the Castro district no longer garners unanimity. Many gays, lesbians, and also queers and trans people certainly continue to want to live there, especially when they are financially able to—as are the so-called Dinkies (Double Income No Kids), an acronym in the gay community on the West Coast and one way to be ironic when referring to new middle-class, gay couples who lived in comfort. Yet even without children, high rents force some gays to live outside the Castro, in quirky locales such as SoMA (South of Market), the Mission District, Haight-Ashbury, and Lower Haight (the Castro’s little brother to the north), not to mention in popular areas for gays in Oakland and Berkeley. So after the Castro there is no gayborhood that really comes in second, but rather many neighborhoods, as if gays were at home everywhere—even if we should never forget that gay couples are still regularly attacked for holding hands in the street in most major US cities, including San Francisco.
Today, as confirmed by US Census statistics, which measure these changes according to the number of same-sex couples in each neighborhood, gay life is tending to dilute itself in the United States. Identity neighborhoods are exploding: homosexuals and heterosexuals are mixing; couples are more likely to have children—all signs of increased integration. The internet, which enables friends and partners to meet outside of gay neighborhoods, is also accelerating the phenomenon. And since its legalization in June 2015, same-sex marriage is completing the movement. In the United States, gayborhoods evolve, and postgay life becomes the norm and the ghetto the exception.
Globalized Gayborhoods
I found these types of neighborhoods all over the world, as if the American urban models remains a matrix for all gay neighborhoods. As my investigation grew over five continents, I saw and recognized the same types: the village, the cluster, the strip, the colony, the alternative district, and the sprawl, with a few more exotic and local variations.
In Toronto, Canada’s economic capital, the gay district is located on Church Street. It follows the village model: a historic district with its gay and lesbian community center, its bars that fly a rainbow flag, and its gay shops. On Church Street, there is an herbalist who sells all kinds of vitamin cocktails, a restaurant that offers “gay urban cowboy” cuisine (where I eat bison), and an animal toiletries store, where I spot a transsexual with three golden, tiny, Mini Spitzes on a leash. The butcher is gay, as are the optician and the cheese seller. You can find free gay newspapers in the delis. Walking along Church Street, I discover the gay Buddies in Bad Times Theater, “where they perform the full modern gay repertoire from Tony Kushner to Larry Kramer, not to mention Québécois playwright Michel Tremblay,” Brendan Healy, its director, tells me. In a small park, a monument has been erected in memory of AIDS victims, whose names are listed by year over fourteen stelae arranged in an arc (on one of them I read the name “Gaëtan Dugas” a.k.a. “patient zero,” the famous Air Canada flight attendant long thought to be responsible for the initial spread of the epidemic). As everywhere, gay life is also very globalized and highly localized in Toronto. You can listen to Lady Gaga in bars, but you can also see the portrait of the queen of the United Kingdom, including Canada.
Alongside Toronto’s historic Church Street gay district, a second gay neighborhood has emerged in recent years west of the city, on Queen Street West. Artistic and queer, this new gayborhood wishes to stand out: it wants to be less a ghetto and more postgay. It is an alternative and offbeat neighborhood. Traditional activists accuse Queen Street West gays of having lost the sense of community activism, and they in turn criticize Church Street gays for being fossils in a ghettoized and archaic life. A battle of styles, generations, and attitudes.
On rue Sainte-Catherine, Montreal’s gay artery, gay life is vibrant, peaceful, and carefree. The neighborhood is in fact called “le village.” In the summer, when Ste-Catherine turns into a pedestrian mall, they broaden the café patios, and gay couples stroll with their children. The gay-friendly police ride their bicycles, and the body-built policemen are so beautiful that you wonder if they were assigned there on purpose. Convenience stores and cleaners fly rainbow flags. Even there, gay life is very Americanized, and, even if French is spoken there, Second Cups could easily be mistaken for Starbucks. In bars, the music is Anglo, and the flat screens broadcast American images. For more diversity, you have to hang out around the Métro Berri stop, south of Ste-Catherine. That’s where the counterculture has taken root. There are stray gays here, in the wild; punk lesbians; heteros who read On the Road too many times—all of them more or less homeless. One of them sees me taking notes in a notebook and asks me in a very strong French accent, “You the police?” I answer, “No. From Paris.”
Other gayborhoods have grown on the village model. This is the case with the Marais in Paris, around the rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie; with Soho in London, around Soho Square and Old Compton Street; but also with the gay district near the Grand-Place (rue du Marché-au-Charbon) in Brussels and the Chueca district in Madrid.
Chueca is a lively and mixed area in the city center where gays choose to take up residence in all of the vinotecas (wine bars) and the plaza’s tapas bars. In the winter, a Christmas market sets up in the square, and gays take refuge in the Bohemia, the BeBop, and the Verdoy Cerveceria cafeteria that stays open. In the summer, the square turns into a true LGBT outdoor theater, bubbling and full of color. The ice cream vendor, a painful sight in December, lights up, while the food stand, all curled up when it’s cold, unfurls its fruit to attract regulars. The night never ends in winter but is so short in the summertime that it is midnight when you meet for dinner and decide on what the night’s activities will be.
As in Greenwich Village, in Chueca several gay bookstores have been converted into LGBT souvenir shops: you can find rainbow-colored bath towels, sex toys sporting mild erections, and even suggestive gay Chupa Chups. And, of course, films—piles of DVDs of the TV series Queer as Folk for sale—and porn films. In one of these bookshops, A Different Life, I found a motley, rainbow-colored bull—at Chueca, you are Spanish and gay at once.
In emerging countries, gay neighborhoods tend to adopt the cluster model. Gayborhoods are less historical, more functional, and prioritize conviviality and sometimes safety. This is the case with Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro and near Arouche Place in São Paulo. In both of these Brazilian cities, there are numerous bars in a relatively small area. Gays shun most tourist spots, such as the Copacabana Beach in Rio, where, except for a small booth dubbed the Rainbow Pizzeria across from the Copacabana Palace, heterosexuality predominates. Brazilian gays are present in droves, however, on the Ipanema beach around Visconde de Pirajá and Farme de Amoedo. There they stop to get vitaminas or one of those exotic fresh juices, sucos, often made of Amazonian fruits that are unknown in Europe. The gay revolution is under way at the Tônemai bar in Ipanema, all night at the spectacular nightclub The Week, at the sophisticated Lounge 00, at the decadent club 1140 (in a distant suburb, among several favelas northwest of Rio), and at the typically postgay club Espaço Acústica. Gays own and assume their economic and political power and take pleasure in their victories (the Brazilian Supreme Court established same-sex marriage in 2013), even as they make sure not to forget the social tensions and violence in Brazilian society (homophobic crimes are frequent, and more than 1,600 LGBT people were killed between 2012 and 2016 because of their sexuality: that is to say, one antigay crime was committed on average each day in Brazil). Nevertheless, homosexuals, who are upwardly mobile, are proud of belonging to the famous emerging Brazilian “C Class,” those working-class milieus turned creative middle class under President Lula da Silva. And in the bars of Vitória Street in São Paulo, where it is summer even in the winter, you can watch soccer games on giant flat-screen TVs—which have been invading gay venues as they have everywhere else this past decade—as if homosexuality were completely banal. “We are based here in São Paulo because it’s the real gay capital of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is a city of tourists; the gay scene is smaller, concentrated in Ipanema, and more conservative. It’s a facade of a gay city. The real gay capital is São Paulo,” says André Fischer, the founder of the main Brazilian gay site, MixBrazil. In its way, the gay scene has jump-started the globalization of the whole country: you can see Brazil, with its new wealth and diversity, emerging as the undisputed leader in Latin America.
In Mexico City, the gayborhood is concentrated in the Zona Rosa district, near the Insurgentes metro. Mexican gay men walk around hand in hand, and gay places, especially bars, are numerous on Amberes, Florencia, and Genova streets. Its six Starbucks cafés, restaurants, and bookstores are also perforce gay. Here gays look northward—to the United States—more than to Latin America. The bars’ names are evocative, almost always in English: Pride, Black Out, Play Bar, Rainbow Bar, 42nd Street … even if there are also the more local bars, the Gayta, the Macho Café, and the Papi Fun Bar. “In this neighborhood, you are safe,” says Alejandro, a Mexican finishing his frijoles (mashed black beans) in the gay-friendly bookstore El Pendulo. “In this neighborhood, everyone welcomes you openly if you consume. Elsewhere in Mexico, gays are not received with the respect they deserve.”
Yet there is a second cluster in Mexico, in the downtown Centro Histórico, around Calle República de Cuba. Here the bars are newer and more working class. They are often karaoke bars dubbed canta bars and cantinas that are a kind of very masculine cabaret, serving up cheap food and lots of tequila. At El Viena bar, for example, where you enter as into a cowboys’ saloon, there is salsa dancing, and you can listen to Gloria Estefan, Luis Miguel, and Lucía Méndez (top model, telenovela actress, and singer). At the Oasis bar, there is a singing competition featuring known arias of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Gay men wear Mexican hats, as Julio does, who takes his turn singing and wins by choosing traditional Mexican ranchera music. At the El Marrakech Salon, you get a mixture of Anglo-American and Mexican music, while images of the underground movie Pink Flamingos, starring the extraordinary Divine, are projected on a large screen. Outside, street vendors sell single cigarettes—four pesos—a poverty index of the neighborhoods.
The richest clientele in Mexico end the night in spectacular clubs in the Condesa and Paseo de Las Palmas neighborhoods—a wealthy enclave where the Vuitton boutique rubs shoulders with Cartier. There, hundreds of gay people appear in costume for the Envi party. Here you see a recently guillotined Louis XVI, there a bride with a wedding dress three meters long, and here another lesbian transformed into a Frida Kahlo painting. There are animals of all species and drag queens of all sexes. And then suddenly Ricky Martin, more true and more beautiful than in person. Seeing such exotic wildlife, I think to myself that the Pigalle of the Gay Roaring Twenties must have looked like this—Mexico having supplanted Miami’s, Madrid’s, and even Paris’s sense of fun. The awakening of Mexico and Brazil as both emerging and gay countries is a major turning point.
Looking across the world for other examples of gay neighborhoods that have developed on the cluster model, there is an embarrassment of riches. There is one in Seoul, the gay district of Itaewon, where bars are gathered on two small parallel sloping streets. In Rome, at San Giovanni in Laterano, near the Colosseum, the Coming Out bar has been an Italian national symbol ever since an aggressive carabinieri raid. As if in solidarity, all the other cafés have grouped about it in a cluster. There is a tiny gay quarter in Naples, more light-weight and more discreet, around beautiful Bellini Square, near the Dante metro station. Dubbed piccolo ghetto by Neapolitans, it is a very small cluster, almost a colony. Another colony: the seaside town of Puerto Vallarta in western Mexico on the Pacific, where gays rent their summer quarters.
In Colombia, one of the countries in Latin America with the greatest inequality, Bogotá is an example of duality between a cheap but unsafe working-class gay cluster (around the Avenida Primero de Mayo) and a revitalized chic neighborhood typical of the artistic alternative model (Chapinero). In the bars of the former, you can find a very popular gay culture: salsa, merengue, vallenato, and, as elsewhere in Latin America, reggaetón. At the Punto 59, a gay bar in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, I even see gay men, all wearing Mexican hats, dancing to a Mexican ranchera. This is where the famous Teatron nightclub is, one of the largest gay complexes in Latin America, with a dozen bars spread over several floors, where several thousand people bump up against each other every weekend. The place opened fifteen years ago and is guarded because of the rampant insecurity of Colombia, and the cover charge is expensive (25,000 pesos, or about US$10). Once past the different security checks, you are in a free zone for gays. On the ground floor are the big classic clubs. Starting on the next floor up, you come to a huge outdoor patio, like a real cardboard telenovela set. There are about ten small, colored, lit-up houses where you can play pool, sing manic karaoke, dance to local reggaetón, or sit in a quiet café. Gays are sometimes ironic about this bohemian club, a symbol of mariconcracia, a derogatory term that describes the overly rapid upward mobility of gays (maricón is Spanish for “fag”). Homosexuals obtained the right to marry in Colombia in 2016.
To find a strip-model gay neighborhood, you can go to Singapore, which has developed a relatively free gayborhood on both sides of Neil Road despite remaining an authoritarian and homophobic country. As for the sprawl model, where scattering is preferred to clustering, it is an American term still too tied to the specific development of suburbs in the United States. In many other capitals, it is more about being scattered within the city limits, not beyond. Hong Kong offers a good example: there are gay bars scattered a little bit everywhere in this particularly gay-friendly Chinese city. This is also the case in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the gay capital of Latin America, where there is really no specifically gay area because the city is gay-friendly almost everywhere.
Amsterdam offers something unique: a promise of future expansion—namely, the growth of clusters. There are indeed several small clusters, scattered throughout different streets of the city (on Warmoesstraat, Spuistraat, Reguliersdwars, Zeedijk, and Kerkstraat). “Gays used to tend to cluster; nowadays, as homosexuality has grown commonplace, gays are scattered throughout the city. It is one of the unexpected effects of tolerance and acceptance. In Amsterdam, gays streets mesh with the rest of the city, and young gays, well accepted everywhere, are sometimes reluctant to bury themselves in bars of a specific type and now prefer to go out to bars that are simply gay-friendly, which is to say everywhere,” says Boris Dittrich, a bit nostalgically. He was the famous Dutch member of Parliament (MP) who in 2001 brought up the vote for same-sex marriage and whom I interview in Amsterdam. Dittrich adds wryly, “In Amsterdam, paradoxically, it’s actually straight people who’ve got their ghetto in the red-light district.”
Even more broken up and scattered into sprawl is the gay scene in Tel Aviv. Some years ago I visited a gay section around Basel Street; today, gay venues are more scattered. Rothschild Boulevard, one of the city’s trendy streets, brings a number of gay places together, and I see many gay couples in the streets with their children, alongside religious Jewish Orthodox gays (a new phenomenon, however, that does not exist in Jerusalem, a less friendly city where in June 2015 an ultra-Orthodox Jew attacked six people in a Gay Pride parade with a knife, killing one of them). Yet the Israeli Ministry of Tourism and the city of Tel Aviv are combining efforts to attract European and American LGBT tourists. They have increased campaigns using homoerotic brochures and gay-friendly videos to make Tel Aviv an “ideal holiday destination for gays.” This marketing operation, known as the “Brand Israel” campaign, seeks to improve Israel’s global image as a modern, young, and open country. And that’s what I see in Tel Aviv. The number of gay cafés is striking. Another local peculiarity: the importance of daytime cafés. These are places for daily life, not for cruising, as one does in bars at night—places where groups of friends can meet regardless of their sexuality. Everything here is very fluid, very mobile. Gays seem at home and well integrated everywhere in Tel Aviv. They have opened bars and clubs (on Frishman Avenue and Ben Yehuda Street, in the Florentine neighborhood, and near the Gan Meir Park). Everywhere, gay cafés and restaurants seem to constantly change owners and names, which gives the impression that there is a high turnover. This bulimia nevertheless seems less dictated by gay habits than by the real estate market and business laws. As for nighttime gay gatherings, they are often organized in straight places, and they change locations and names from one week to another. “In fact, gay life is widely scattered in Tel Aviv, as if, as homosexuality was gaining acceptance in Israel, gays came out of their ghetto and started establishing themselves in the city,” Benny Ziffer, the editor of the main Israeli daily Ha’aretz, tells me in Tel Aviv. Fragile acceptance? It was at the Youth Bar, a café frequented by gay youths on Nahmani Street in Tel Aviv, that there was an (unclaimed) attack in 2009, leaving two dead and six seriously injured. The gay community was deliberately targeted.
From Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv, from Amsterdam to London, a principle seems to be gradually emerging: the more a city is gay-friendly, the more gay life spreads, scatters, and dissolves into the urban fabric; the more fragile gay acceptance is, the more gays group together into villages and clusters.
Finally, there are unique models that do not seem to exist anywhere else. Such is the case of a true ghetto, such as the Silom area of Bangkok, where two small streets, Silom Soi 2 and Silom Soi 4, are real night enclaves for gays that are overprotected and locked (you enter the area through metal detectors). The model of the Red House in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, is very different: located west of downtown near the Danshui River, it is a square where an old theater converted into a local cultural center is situated, surrounded by enclosures. Some fifty gay bars have opened there, mostly outdoors, on two floors. In this enclave, which is both central and secluded, hundreds of gays move from one café to another, all wearing Bermuda shorts, Converse sneakers, and Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts (the climate is almost tropical and very humid when I’m there). At the Sol Café, at the Paradise, at the Gaydar, and at the Dalida Café, the music is Taiwanese (local boy bands), Chinese (Mandarin pop), and Anglo (Coldplay and Rod Stewart, for example, on the nights I am there). From one bar to another, across the patio, the music is repeated and blended, risking cacophony—all without any real programming or soul. Rainbow flags are everywhere, and the Taiwanese seem as moved by this gay emblem as by their national flag (that of the Republic of China, red with a beautiful sun on a blue background), which is also raised at gay bars—two symbols of a still fragile freedom. Between two bars, street vendors in small stalls offer Taiwanese crafts, street food, and exceptional vintage Oolong tea. Upstairs are hairdressing and nail salons and tattoo parlors. A bit farther off is a karaoke bar and a Bear Bar, for gay “bears,” who here are nicely called “pandas.” In this other China, the Republic of China, gay life seems very Americanized. In huge letters on the front of a café, a sign reads in English: “Happy Gay Life in Taiwan.” (Same-sex marriage is now possible in Taiwan.)
The “American way of gay life” appears to dominate everywhere. Yet if you look more closely, there are some surprising national, regional, and local distinctions. In the United States itself, the differences are striking. Chicago, for example, whose Lakeview neighborhood, Boystown, offers a concentrated caricature of gay life made in the USA. All it takes, though, is to spend one night at Charlie’s to change worlds. The bar is located on North Broadway, near Halsted Street, and nowadays it is a major hit thanks to its country music line dances. I also saw these line dances in several gay bars of Austin, Detroit, and at Zippers on Church Street in Toronto. There, homosexuals break with global gay culture to stay true to certain musical and local traditions. They repeat them endlessly, through many variations and steps: the Madison, the San Francisco stomp, the cowboy boogie, the nutbush, and the macarena.
Same thing in Buenos Aires, where gay nights revolve entirely around the tango. This is the case at La Marshall, on Independencia Avenue in the San Telmo district. Several times a week gays meet there to improve their technique. One night I saw the teacher focus on the art of placing one foot between the legs of one’s partner and thereby help him rotate. The dancers’ physical proximity is great—a gay tango is even more provocative than a straight tango. On weekends, gay couples can show off in public at clubs such as El Beso and Casa Brandon and display their progress and their prowess. More than with disco or even rock, it takes two to tango: opening up this dance to gay couples is a symbolic revolution in Argentina. Gays revitalizing a fashion in decline in Argentina at large is all the more fascinating.
In the Ye Teng Shan gay bar in Nanjing (a big city between Beijing and Shanghai), I notice that gay men are playing Shai zi, a dice game in which the loser has to knock back a shot of strong alcohol. Others sip a watered-down, local beer. “Everything is adulterated in this country, everything is corrupt, even beer,” Shaohua, one of the people I went with, tells me. There is no American music: just contemporary Mandarin pop songs, such as those sung by Huang Xiao Hu. And when it is time for the drag show, the performers, with heavy makeup on, move to a classic Beijing Opera tune, the song of an emperor of a very ancient dynasty, and a few famous Bollywood tunes. “But we hate that! We’ve had enough of those cheesy shows! We want to see muscular men on stage, real men! Not transvestites!” Shaohua, Lu, Robin, and Shan, four students with me that night, lament in turn. Yet late in the evening, these students take the stage one after another to push their song and sing karaoke in Chinese, far from America and Yankee virility.
Local peculiarities are striking. At Eddy’s Bar in the gay cluster at Tian Ping Road in Shanghai, there are countless numbers of Buddhas. Close by, at the Shanghai Studio, a former fallout shelter that one enters through a maze of corridors lit by small, colorful, and fireproof lantern balls, there is a Dragon Boat Party taking place. And the Shinjuku ni-chome district in Tokyo—both a ghetto and a fluid neighborhood, a very long and very high one, too, where a hundred or so small bars are bunched up together in the buildings—presents an extraordinarily original and wonderfully Japanese model. Less global than national.
In Buenos Aires as in Bogotá, Rio, and Mexico City, Beijing and Singapore, and even in Jakarta, Mumbai, Istanbul, and Johannesburg, I follow those gays who although being Americanized and globalized wish to maintain the flame of a local gay culture, without accelerated growth and globalization. Gays may be entering into globalization, gay capitals may be becoming Americanized, middle-class gays may be emerging full speed ahead, but homosexuality continues to be experienced very locally. It is steeped in national culture and regional characteristics. Gays remain both global and local—proof that there are unique and national non-US gay liberations.